'Frank' Riffs on the Pop Curiosity Frank Sidebottom

Video A scene from the film “Frank,” with Michael Fassbender and Domhnall Gleeson.

By MARC SPITZ

August 7, 2014

We have grown used to verisimilitude in our musician biopics. “The Buddy Holly Story,”“Walk the Line” and “Ray,” and even those that seem a little campy today, like Oliver Stone’s “The Doors,” follow the rules: The wigs can’t be too terrible, and the facts need to be intact. The recent James Brown biopic, “Get On Up,” is similarly straightforward. Even “24 Hour Party People” playfully broke the fourth wall but treated the life and death of its most famous figure, Ian Curtis, faithfully. But what if the musician at the heart of the story was a man who wore a giant puppet head in public?

When the trailer for the new film “Frank,” starring Michael Fassbender in the title role, debuted on The Guardian’s website, the accompanying article took care to identify it as a story “inspired” by the British singer-songwriter Chris Sievey, who died in 2010, and his alter ego, Frank Sidebottom. One of the only things that Mr. Fassbender’s Frank has in common with the actual Frank is that it would be difficult to take him hat shopping.

“Chris introduced Frank to the Freshies at a rehearsal,” said Mick Middles, author of “Frank Sidebottom Out of His Head,” an authorized e-book biography out in hardcover in November. “For a short while, Frank became used as the Freshies’ No. 1 fan. Before long, it became obvious that Frank was taking over. The Freshies were offered a chance to join Frank’s band. By 1985, Frank became omnipresent on the Manchester scene. People ‘got him’ immediately.”

That scene included innovative groups like the Fall and New Order. But Sievey’s papier-mâché orb, with neatly parted dark hair and wide, expressionless blue eyes, was somehow riveting as well. Unfortunately, many gigs by the Frank Sidebottom Oh Blimey Big Band were chaotic, and consisted of sloppy, keyboard-driven covers of ’70s hits by Queen, Wings and Mott the Hoople. The band had a go at a holiday song (“Christmas Is Really Fantastic”) and a World Cup chant, and even appeared multiple times on British TV, but actual stardom was not to be. When it scored an opening slot for a Wembley Arena concert headlined by the boy band Bros, Frank and his musicians tanked it, dispensing with their own set and doing horrible versions of Bros songs. Still, the real Frank removed his head and seemed to be enjoying the anarchy and the attention.

“He preferred the bad gigs,” Mr. Middles said.

The screen Frank, by contrast, is a brooding, haunted musician, leading a dissonant noise band complete with theremin player (a deadpan Maggie Gyllenhaal). Mr. Fassbender’s baritone fits the gloomy rock. He said, “Initially, I had an impulse to go for a higher-register voice” — a tone more like the actual Frank’s, in other words — “but decided it would be more interesting to go lower register, and I kind of used an Iggy Pop sort of voice.”

And the head stays on, even in the shower.

One of the screenwriters, Jon Ronson, is now a noted author, but as a young man, he was keyboardist for the Sidebottom band. When it came to the script, he wrestled with the idea of altering history. “It took me a little while, because I’m a journalist,” Mr. Ronson said. His writing partner, Peter Straughan, whose credits include the 2011 “Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy,” as well as a 2009 adaptation of Mr. Ronson’s book “The Men Who Stare at Goats,” had to coax him into playing with not only Sievey’s past but also his own.

“Peter was really used to taking these huge leaps into fiction,” Mr. Ronson said. “Quite early on he said to me, ‘It’s O.K., Jon, we’re allowed to make things up.’ ”

Thanks to the head, “Frank” the film functions as a biopic mash-up of multiple artists. “We spent a lot of time together hammering out how this hidden character could contain almost any number of influences and traits,” said the director, Lenny Abrahamson. “And as we went on, it became clear that the most exciting thing for us would be to make him stand for and refract lots of these outsider musicians.”

And so Frank is the eccentric Syd Barrett. Frank is Lee (Scratch) Perry. Frank is Brian Wilson. Frank is Roky Erickson. The deeply troubled but beloved Austin, Tex., singer songwriter Daniel Johnston is under that head as well. And when the fictional band decamps to a remote home in the countryside, “That’s a riff on Captain Beefheart’s recording of ‘Trout Mask Replica,’ ” Mr. Abrahamson said, referring to the 1969 classic.

Eliminating the burden of fact freed the filmmakers to explore the madness involved in creating art itself rather than the minutiae of one particular artist. It’s at heart a slapstick comedy, albeit one about extremely messed-up souls. “You’re just going to have to go with this,” a band mate played by Scoot McNairy explains to the fictional Ronson.

Then there’s the novelty of a handsome movie star spending most of an indie film under a papier-mâché head, as covered up as he was revealed in the 2011 drama “Shame.”

“I did debate it with myself early, should we cast an unknown?” Mr. Abrahamson said. “But if we used someone well known, a meta-level set of ideas come into play. Fassbender’s brand’s become somewhat divorced from the person. If you think about a movie with a big star in it, it takes a while before you’re looking at the character and not the actor.”

Mr. Fassbender had studied commedia dell’arte, a type of theater that relies heavily on masks, and he handles the head expertly. But it’s not every actress who can play a scene opposite a guy in a big head, skilled as she may be.

Ms. Gyllenhaal said she was drawn to the movie in part because it would be a chance to work with Mr. Fassbender. “Our characters are going to be soul mates,” she recalled thinking initially. But “then I get there, and it wasn’t really like that. And I said to myself after a day or two: ‘What were you thinking? He’s wearing a papier-mâché head.’ ”

But she added that the characters’ relationship “is one I’ve been in before, where they’re looking for a connection and they’re not getting one, and that kind of disappointment can make people mean.”

The real Chris Sievey was, at the end of the last decade, impoverished and ill with throat cancer, but he knew about the film as well as the biography. “He was aware that he would be a myth,” Mr. Middles said, and he encouraged Mr. Ronson and company to make “Frank” the abstraction it is today: perhaps his last act of mischief, as the changes have angered many Sidebottom purists.

“He didn’t really want there to be a character based on Chris, because he was quite hedonistic,” Mr. Ronson said.

Most tales of rock mythology have their own superherolike creation story. (Johnny Cash’s older brother, Jack, perishes in a carpentry accident, for example.) “Frank” is the rare film in which the hero’s origin seems mundane. In real life, few really knew why Sievey wore or needed the head. Yet “Frank” cannot help putting Frank Sidebottom squarely in the long cinematic queue of misunderstood, perhaps doomed geniuses, and such stature can also be reductive despite the skills of the filmmakers.

“That is the fear,” Mr. Middles said. “Especially in America, where people didn’t really know Frank Sidebottom. The film character may swamp the reality.”